Your name is Silky. You are a spider. No, not just a spider, you’re a helpful spider, part of a group of helpful spiders living in a human’s house. And you basically have free reign of the entire house, so you’re going to do your best to help out around the place by cooking breakfast, watering some plants, doing the dishes – stuff any helpful spider might do for a human. This is the very silly idea behind A Webbing Journey, developed by Fire Totem Games and published by them and Future Friends Games. A Webbing Journey is an adventure game, currently in Early Access, about trying to accomplish little tasks in a gigantic world through the use of what you as a Spider (or a rolling orb, should you activate the game’s arachnophobia mode) have at your disposal: the ability to jump, stick to walls and objects, and create a ludicrous amount of super strong super sticky web. But you are just an ordinary spider, less than an inch tall and so lightweight that a fan will send you flying. So, how do you complete vital tasks like making a breakfast of eggs and bacon for the family? With a lot of trial and error, mostly.
The first thing I want to talk about is the controls. You can play with keyboard and mouse or controller. I primarily played with controller, and had no issues with either control scheme. The controls are fairly simple. You can fire a line of web between yourself and a point or object that vanishes when you release the button, fire a line of web from your position to where you’re aimed at, change your web to make webs from a specific point to various other points when firing the main web button, web an object with the primary web button and then fix that object to you to drop it behind you, and change the web mode to create a web between one point and another and then continue webbing from the second point. There is a cancel option to delete webs and turn off the alternate web modes. You also talk to other spiders, and check what helpful tasks you have done and still have to do.
In general, there’s no surface you cannot walk on, but some of them do slip and move as you cross or web them – cabinets open, toy cars will roll, blocks will fall over, that sort of thing. The game occasionally has trouble adjusting when you transition between moving vertically downwards to moving horizontally forwards upside down, but aside from that it is very intuitive about moving around, regardless of your specific orientation. What’s also very intuitive and fun to boot is the web swinging, one of the fastest ways to get around the environment in the game. The act of jumping into the air, sending out a web line and letting the tension pull you up into a swing is just great, as is the feeling of both movement and accomplishment for managing to measure your speed, distance, and angle to get within range of a usable and helpful grapple point to continue swinging where you want to go. There’s no automatic targeting for your swinging webs like in other spider-movement games one could mention, but the added challenge of needing to line up and time shots made the swinging all the more satisfying and fun. Each story level has a race to run, which involves navigating through large circles around the map while web swinging, to try and beat a target time. Nailing these swings and beating the times was immensely satisfying. I’d love a mode just about web races.
While A Webbing Journey doesn’t have any adversaries (no dogs, cats or humans to attack you or get in your way), and no hazards (you can’t drown in water or hurt yourself on a stove or in a microwave, for example), you do have to deal with the inherent limitation of trying to affect objects that are many times your size in a world built for creatures hundreds, if not thousands, of times your size. Enter once again the webs. For example, you have a task to clean dirty plates sitting by the sink. To do this you need to use your webs to move the drain stopper into place, drag some soap into the sink, pull the handle on the sink to get the water running, and then pull the plates into the soapy water. In the same level there’s a task to water several plants, which you can normally do by grabbing a water orb with some web and dragging it any of the numerous plants around the kitchen. But there’s a semi-hidden way to complete these tasks once if you know how to use your webs.
At the time of writing, there are three story mode levels in A Webbing Journey, and three more levels in the sandbox mode just for exploration and physics-based fun. The development roadmap for the next several months is already mapped out, with several updates happening in the next few months – fixes and features for June and July, but an entirely new level in August. Despite it being in Early Access, I only encountered a single bug, in which I somehow managed to softlock the game by erasing my own spider, a feat I have not been able to replicate despite trying and was my fault in the first place for trying to solve a task in an incredibly unlikely way. A Webbing Journey is great fun in its current state. If you like physics-based puzzle games, or web swinging physics in general, you’re sure to get your money’s worth here.
Tim reviewed A Webbing Journey on PC in Early Access with a provided review copy.
